Jack Gyllenhaal to star Tom Clancy’s The Division movie

Almost three years after his death, novelist and video-game designer, Tom Clancy, comes back to theaters. Ubisoft Motion Pictures officially announced the production of The Division movie based on 2016 Tom Clancy’s The Divison title for PS4 and Xbox One.

Jessica Chastain (Interstellar) and Jake Gyllenhaal (Nightcrawler) will star the upcoming movie. These two are heavily involved in the production, as the film will roll in collaboration with both Chastain’s Freckle Films and Gyllenhaal’s Nine Stories studio.

Rumours of the actors’ involvement first surfaced in June, but the film production and casting went official this Tuesday. Other projects in the oven are Watch Dogs, Splinter Cell, Ghost Recon and Rabbids. Ubisoft Motion Pictures seems to be set to break the video game movie curse.

It is worth noting that Gyllenhaal was the protagonist on 2010’s Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, also an Ubisoft video game turned into a movie. Back then, the result was not promising, as the film obtained mixed reviews (36% on Rotten Tomatoes, 6.6 on IMDB and 50% on Metacritic) and made but $336.4 million at the box office.

The Division boasts of having 900 million active players exploring a vast and complex universe

Released in March, The Division is an online FPS-RPG set in a near-future New York, where an epidemic has taken over the streets and chaos is the law. Players enter the city to investigate the spread of the deadly decease and prevent the city from descending into full anarchy.

The Division features an open world version of a post-biological-disaster Manhattan. The player can enter the area via an individual server, with an accompanying party or not, to explore this winter wasteland and fight looters, gangs and fulfill peacekeeping missions for poor NPC’s. There is also the Dark Zone, the only region of the map where players can fight other online players while roaming around.

But not all is good in The Division, a game where the conventions of the RPG genre clashes with the realism of Clancy’s shooter games, and the emptiness of an online open world. IGN deemed it an “okay” game with a 6.7 score.

Either way, this “okay” game that is certainly not highlighted for its plot will reach cinemas. In the official blog, Ubisoft wrote the describe pandemic-stricken streets will be the space where the plot develops, a tale “filled with countless stories of love, loss, treachery, and heroism.”

Maybe, is not about the plot, but because the game sold $330 million worth of copies around the world during the first week, becoming the biggest launch ever for a new game franchise. The game is very popular, currently boasting a more than 900 million active players.

Tom Clancy’s novels depict espionage in a very detailed way

Tom Clancy is an American writer best known for his technically detailed espionage and military science novels.

Clancy’s literary career began in 1984 with The Hunt for Red October, and reached its peak with The Sum of All Fears (1991), a book already saw its theatrical version.

Jack Ryan is Clancy’s most famous character, a U.S Navy that escalated to U.S president and had appeared in many of his novels and their respective film adaptations. Alec Baldwin, Harrison Ford, Ben Affleck, and Chris Pine have all taken their turn in Ryan’s American-hero boots.

Ryan may be accustomed to appear on the big screen. Clancy’s video game characters are not, and video games turned into movies have seen more shame than success, and the result is to be seen for the name behind of Rainbow Six, Splinter Cell and Ghost Recon series.

The division is not the only game jumping to the theater screen

A quite promising trailer nerds-out every Assassins Creed fan for its upcoming theatrical version, this time with a plot centering in the Spanish Inquisition. Inside the time-traveling, Animus Machine people can see the star, Michael Fassbender, also young Magneto in Fox’s X-Men franchise.

Let’s hope Assassins Creed can succeed where Warcraft failed, and the audiences soon change their mind about the quality of video-game-turned-into-films.